Thursday, January 21, 2016

Awful, horrible stories that we
think should never see the light of day. These are words written or art that
was crafted from the beginning of your career, or written last weekend when you
may or may not have had too much to drink. Not that I have done that, or not done that.

Just because something you wrote
overall is bad doesn’t mean you don’t have a gem buried deep inside the muck.
Think of it like a bad movie. Think of it like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Overall this movie is bad. It
forgets the mythos that made the franchise popular, and apparently allows for
the creation of atomic blast resistant refrigerators. But there are some great parts. References
back to what makes the franchise wonderful can be found all throughout the
movie. We see Indie’s first love. There is humor, and even some quality action
that is only slightly ruined by an unfortunate camera filter. The movie could have
been a great addition to the franchise.

What I am trying to say is that the
bones are there. We have romance,
action, an almost quality story line. Only the deep seated mystery needed to be
changed. The same is most likely true of that garbage story you wrote. The
bones are there you just need to go back to it and find those bones. Pluck out
those unnecessary organs, like the inter-dimensional beings that have no
business being there.

I recently had to do this with two
novels. They had stalled, and a stalled novel can be a death knell. I kept
thinking of ways to make it work. Places I could try and bring the plot. The
characters had stopped talking to me. I realized I had to go through and
perform an autopsy and figure out what went wrong. I found quite a bit that I couldn’t use, but
I also found quite a bit I could, and those parts were the real backbone of my
story. I had lost that focus somewhere along the way. Kind of like when I blog
but that is a different story.

I am going to go through a similar
process for two other blogs I created that I had to step away from. They are up
for a little while longer if you care to search for them. One is Jesse Magnan’s
Blog of the Lance, and the other is Jesse Magnan’s Blog of the Realms. They are
based on two table top games that I ran but had to stop recently for various
reasons. But in those blogs (and the various notes I have to go along with
them) are bits of plot, action scenes,
characters, and dialogue that I will pull out and combine into a new beast that
is still the same (and doesn’t violate any copyright or intellectual property).

Bad work can still have some good
writing. The hardest part can be recognizing what is quality versus what is
something you are fond of.

About Me

Getting older means having survived another year on a planet that is trying to kill us, in a solar system that is a shooting gallery within a galaxy that has a black hole in the center in a universe that isn't even aware of our existence.